Search results for "Higher"

Progression to higher education from VET in Nordic countries : Mixed policies and pathways

2018

A new indicator for higher education student performance

2014

The debate on academic achievement is a heated issue that involves all the higher education contexts. This paper attempts to provide an indicator that can make the measurement of university student performance easier and that can be easily applied to different systems, making comparisons more fair. The Italian University System is used as a starting point to make several considerations on the current measures and to build up a new performance indicator. Then, a generalization for other marking systems is shown and finally a quantile regression is performed to investigate some determinants of the new performance indicator, also with respect to the current one.

Publishing studies

2015

In some parts of the world, Publishing Studies are a fairly well-established field of research as well as of higher education. Not least since this is not so much the case in continental Europe, the Publishing Studies community increasingly sees a more elaborated self-concept as an important prerequisite for a prosperous further development of the field in research as well as in teaching. This paper starts off by relating the question for an advanced self-concept of Publishing Studies to the question what criteria have to be fulfilled to call a field (like Publishing Studies) a scholarly discipline. As the second source for the possible formation of a more elaborate self-concept, the paper …

Interactivity, Values and the Microgenesis of Learning in a Tertiary Setting

2016

Student learning is a hot topic in tertiary education circles these days. However, it is not always clear what words like ‘learning’ and ‘learner’ mean. It is important for educationalists to understand learning as it actually occurs in real-time learning situations. We build on Hutchins’ theory of distributed cognition and Gibson’s ecological psychology to show how human learning is an interactive process. We propose Multimodal Event Analysis as a tool for analyzing a University tutorial in which students attempt to solve a problem of regression analysis. We investigate how participants’ multimodal interactivity with the changing affordance arrays of the learning situation is the driver an…

Agenda Setting and Policy Development, Higher Education

2018

Agenda setting is one of key concepts in the critical or interpretative approaches in the study of policy development. Developed in response to positivist paradigms, which saw policies as largely technical solutions to objectively existing problems, critical or interpretive analysis emphasises the constructed, contingent, and processual nature of policies, in particular the role of differently positioned actors in bringing specific issues to the fore (Fischer, 2003). In this sense, the use of agenda setting in the research on higher education policy is fundamentally related to the questions of political power and influence, and thus to the relationship between longer-term structural change …

Digital Approaches to Integrating Refugees into Higher Education—Frontiers and Advances

2021

This SpringerBriefs volume illustrates the potentials of digital learning opportunities in higher education for refugees with different educational, social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds from various perspectives and based on research conducted in several countries. Global challenges for academic success that refugees face when seeking to enter higher education are outlined. One possibility to reduce the obstacles for refugees entering higher education is to offer digital learning platforms. A selection of international digital education platforms for refugees are presented, which are based on a variety of approaches to accommodate the needs of prospective refugee students. Based on …

The Development of Finland’s Higher Education System After the Second World War – Towards a Welfare State

2019

Finland lost the war against the Soviet Union but won the peace after the Second World War. The defeat forced Finnish society to change. Higher education played a crucial role in these processes, resulting in a Nordic Welfare State in the 1980s. The author gives an overview of the major political changes in Finland between the 1940s and the 2010s.

THE IMPACT OF WARFARE ON THE SOIL ENVIRONMENT

2013

Abstract One of the most dramatic ways humans can affect soil properties is through the performance of military activities. Warfare-induced disturbances to soil are basically of three types – physical, chemical, and biological – and are aimed at causing direct problems to enemies or, more often, are indirect, undesired ramifications. Physical disturbances to soil include sealing due to building of defensive infrastructures, excavation of trenches or tunnels, compaction by traffic of machinery and troops, or cratering by bombs. Chemical disturbances consist of the input of pollutants such as oil, heavy metals, nitroaromatic explosives, organophosphorus nerve agents, dioxins from herbicides, …

Strategic Actor-Hood and Internal Transformation

2014

In most European countries, the Nordic region included, higher education (HE) has undergone a profound transformation in the last couple of decades. This process is partly a result of substantial changes in society - such as declining birth rates, an ageing population and the rise of a global knowledge-based economy - in tandem with broad policy efforts aimed at modernising the public sector (Peters & Savoie, 1998) as a means of guaranteeing the future sustainability of the (Nordic) welfare state (Christiansen, Petersen, & Haave, 2005).

International student mobility in Southern-Latin Europe: beyond the EU logics, towards a new space

2018

This paper discusses international student mobility (ISM) in Southern-Latin Europe, specifically Italy, Portugal, and Spain, analysing the inflow of international students as reflected in the UNESCO, OECD and European Commission databases. Only recently Italy, Portugal and Spain, as latecomers, have become more actively involved in ISM dynamics. This trend has been a response to EU pressures to internationalization, instrumented through the consolidation of the Bologna process and the need to build a common space of higher education. The analysis shows that at the intra-European level Italy, Portugal and Spain share similar ISM patterns; however, in the global context other logics shape ISM…